Vlasta's blog

You may or may not have noticed that latest builds of RealWorld Paint and RealWorld Icon Editor are available from their respective home pages. If you are curious, you can download and test them at any time.

The world is moving forward faster and faster and we all want new things to play with. So, let's make the latest builds of RealWorld software available to everyone. This preview versions will be available in addition to the current "stable" versions.

The first specification of the JPEG image format was published more than 20 years ago and it obviously was a great success. Even after so many years, most digital cameras still produce .jpg images and a good portion of all images on the web are .jpg images. Now imagine if all .jpgs were about 10 percent smaller with exactly the same quality. Wouldn't that be nice?

It is now over 15 years since the 'Burn all GIFs' movement started. The events that lead to the movement were a prime example of why software patents do more harm than good. The positive thing that came out of it was the spread of the patent-free PNG image format.

The next version of RealWorld Icon Editor is still being developed, but some functions are almost complete and ready to be tested. One of them is batch processing. So, I will be delighted to get some feedback from the icon enthusiast among you - there is still time to make a small change that would make big difference.

Which RealWorld software is the most popular one? If you guessed RealWorld Cursor Editor, you guessed right. RealWorld Paint takes the second place. Both of them are free and so it is no surprise that they are more popular than the paid ones. Here are two graphs that may be interesting and will get more interesting in the future.

One of the things I plan to improve in future versions of RW icon editor is the 3D object to image conversion. Right now, I am only using OpenGL while editing. In the future, it may also be used for the final conversion from a 3D object to an image or an icon. Icons typically have a transparent background, so let me say a few words about what I had to do to perform offscreen rendering in OpenGL with transparent background.

In the past, I only blogged about new software feature that were already complete, just waiting to be published in an upcoming version. I kept my wilder ideas to myself, because I did not want to raise false expectation.

Few days ago, I have visited some of the more well known download sites to see how my software is doing or read an occasional review left there by a happy/unhappy user. I was horrified. Virtually all download sites are overloaded with ads and, what is worse, many of them mislead users to download and install adware instead of the software they actually wanted.

As many of you know, there are 3 contact fields on your profile pages. They allow you to connect your rw-designer profile with your other profiles on the internet. If you have a Google+ profile, connecting it correctly may have an additional advantage for you.

It has been almost 3 years since the last version of RealWorld Icon Editor was published. I would very much like to release an update, but I am not there yet. While the support for vector layers is now complete, I also want to have 3D layers in the next RWIE and it is going to take some more time to get them right.

We live in an age, where information rules. There is a lot of useful bits of info out there, but there is even more noise. Rw-designer.com is much smaller than the whole world, but it may still be difficult to not miss any of the useful bits and not be distracted by the noise. The problem is of course in the definition of useful and noise as every person has their own interests.

Google's WEBP reached 0.3.0 - Mozilla still unconvinced. Although I am a WEBP fan, I perfectly understand Mozilla's position. The Google's image format is still new and rough. Neither the specification nor the libwebp are ready to be widely used. I just spent a couple of days integrating the latest version of libwebp into my freeware image editor and here is a summary of my experiences.

I have made a slight change to the People section of this web site. You can now see icons of users (if they have an approved icon). Another addition is the Subscribe button, which allows you to watch what the people you select are doing (blogging, posting icon or cursor sets).

"I must simplify RWPaint, no new features, it is too big already." That's what I keep telling, but it does not work. I just cannot overcome my nature, 'cause this one new function would be so cool and I simply must add it to the software. Oh, well.

Hooray! The cursor library here on rw-designer is now #1 on Google when searching for "cursors". This is good news for every cursor author, because their creations will be seen and downloaded by more people. It took the effort of numerous cursor authors, reviewers and fans and long 7 years to reach that #1 spot and I want to use this opportunity to express my thankfulness to all of them.